Hey everybody, this is Steve, now today I want to talk about why one of the really
early books on neuro linguistic programming is still quite important
to neuro linguistic programming students even though it's 40 years old and a lot
of the information within it is really obsolete,
it's frogs into princes, it was published in 1979 and is essentially written
from the seminars of the two main founders of neuro linguistic programming,
Richard Bandler and John Grinder, like I say was published in 1979, it does make
it 40 years old, but there's still something important in these really
early books of NLP which you really do not get in most of the modern books on
NLP, and in this video I'm gonna explain why that is and will explain why these
books are still important, I'm going to explain in what ways the information are
obsolete but I'm also going to point at where there is some really rich and
useful information that is worth absorbing from these books, and stay with
me till the end because I'm going to point at some very specific things which
I think modern students of neuro linguistic programming should pay
attention to. Now I myself am an advanced master practitioner and trainer of neuro
linguistic programming, I've been involved with neuro linguistic
programming for nearly 20 years now, I've taught many NLP programs myself
including certification programs and I've assisted on many other people's
trainings too, and unlike a lot of people who have done maybe one two or three
short NLP courses, I've done well over a hundred and twenty days in classrooms,
plus practice groups, with some of the greatest NLP trainers in the world,
including people are very outspoken about what's missing from a lot of
modern NLP training, and I'll try to put some of that across, so if this is of
interest to you please do click like and please also if you're interested in this
or more content like it, including future videos which I'll also be looking at
other books of NLP, then please click the subscribe button
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Now the first question you might have on your minds is why wouldn't this book
still be important? Well in simple terms as I said it was published in 1979 and
is old, and NLP has changed a lot, if you take Richard Bandler for example who is
one of the cofounders of neuro linguistic programming,
he is a prolific and quick creator, he's always experimenting he's always
looking for better ways of doing things and he's constantly adding to his
personal repertoire from his experimentation and dropping things from
his personal repertoire when he's found better ways of doing things, and in
simple terms a lot of what's in that book has been moved on from, now to give
one example about how NLP has moved on in these years in very early days
NLP borrowed ideas from linguistics and transformational grammar and one of the
main idioms that was taught in NLP was this idea of the deep structure and the
surface structure, now I have to say a lot of books and courses get this wrong,
a lot of them say that the deep structure is the sensory experience, the
non linguistic experience, and the surface structure is the language that
you're trying to use to express it, and that's incorrect, if you actually look
right back into the structure of magic and also transformational grammar itself,
both the deep structure and the surface structure were linguistic structures, the
deep structure was for want of a better phrase the fully formed language and the
surface structure was the reduced version of it, and the sensory experience
was something below both of those, so it's one of the ways that a lot of books
and courses actually even get that model wrong, but my real point in bringing this
up is that linguists abandoned that as the wrong concept like 40 years ago, you
know it's only neuro linguistic programmers that still talk about deep
structure and surface structure as if that's the current way of thinking about
linguistics and it's not. Another example of the way that NLP has changed a lot in
the last 40 years is to look at its principle, or one of its principle models,
one of his earliest models, the meta-model, now in its very early days
the meta-model was taught like a very simple stimulus-response model, you hear
this language pattern, you ask that question, now the trouble with that is it
meant that there was lots of questions being asked with no real purpose or
order or sequence and it became known as meta monstering, now one of the other
things about NLP is that there hasn't been one single linear track of
development, basically lots of people have gone off and developed their own
things and they don't necessarily all link up, so to a large extent it's really
hard to track and itemize the way that models have been developed because
different people develop them in different ways, but there's been lots of
development around the meta model, some people have developed it into a model
for getting precision out of language, there have been development to put intention,
order and sequencing to the way that we use it, other people have
developed ways of asking fewer higher more powerful questions, one example of
an exercise that came up well after frogs into princes for example was the
so called one question exercise, where the idea is you you listen you gather a
bunch of information and you construct one question that both gathers powerful
information and causes a powerful shift at the same time, so there's lots of
development of things like the meta-model all over the place that have changed
since these early days of NLP. I don't think that the idea of NLP was ever to
come up with a fixed set of ideas and models and techniques and call that NLP.
as Richard Bandler himself says the techniques are really the byproduct of
NLP. but what NLP itself actually is is that attitude and methodolog.y the
attitude and methodology of inquisitiveness, of modeling of discovery and of coding.
What you find and what really separates that kind of neuro linguistic
programming practitioner from maybe the other kinds is that they're not just
applying fixed ideas, techniques and models, they are engaging in that
attitude and methodology of discovery, of exploration and finding out what works
and what doesn't for themselves, so what is valuable about these old NLP books,
well if you look at a lot of the modern NLP books what they do they convey in
bullet points patterns and models, they convey in bullet points techniques, and
that's a fine way of conveying ideas, but what it doesn't bring across is what
what I think NLP is really about, which is the attitude and methodology, the
attitude of inquisitiveness the attitude of exploration, the methodology of
exploration and discovery and coding things, in other words what a lot of
modern NLP books and courses seem to do is they seem to treat NLP like it's
become a fixed, closed and just-so system of knowledge and techniques, and I really
do not think that was the real intention, and one of the values you get when you
read these old books, which as you can see a much more narrative, they're not
bullet point based, there's humor and anecdotes and stories, and how did we
discover this, and how did we code that, and how did we experiment with this, that
comes across in these books in a way that doesn't come across in these bullet
point books. Another thing that's been lost from these old NLP books as we've
gone to the new NLP books is context, what was the context in which some of
these original ideas were put forward, so in this book when you read about
well-formed outcomes, you realize something, the way well-formed outcomes
are taught in modern NLP is almost like it's a goal-setting system like the
SMART goal setting system, but when you actually read about well-formed outcomes
in this book, what you actually realize is it wasn't really intended like this, that
the whole idea of well-formed outcomes, the full
which by the way is the well formedness conditions for outcomes in therapy, you
might update that to say the well formedness conditions for outcomes in
change work to be more general, but when you read about in this book what you
realize is that it's actually, for want of a better phrase, a meta strategy for the
whole process of leading somebody through therapeutic change, in other
words you keep redirecting people towards what they want rather than what
they don't want, you keep redirecting people to what they can own in terms of
change versus what they can't in terms of change, you keep dealing with the
ecology problems as they come up and you keep dealing with the secondary gains as
they come up, and you keep using see hear feel experiences as a way of directing
the change. So that's why I think these old books are important even if the
information in them is to a large extent obsolete, because NLP changes a lot and
has changed in multiple different directions, there is something about
these books which which convey the context with which certain ideas were
put forward, and there's something about these books which say something about
the attitude and the methodology of NLP that really doesn't come across from
those bullet-pointed books, which just lists presuppositions and models and
techniques. Now if you're interested in neuro linguistic programming and if
you're a professional person I would say that you should be then do subscribe to
this channel because I will talk about more books and ideas around your
linguistic programming in the future, just hit that subscribe button and click
the notifications bell, please do like this video as well share with your
friends comment tell me about your experiences with an NLP and what you
think about this book too, and I'll try my best to respond and other than that,
I'll see you next week